I’m spending close to $1,000/yr to keep my 2009 car on the road and that beats $1,000/month by a long shot.

We're paying the last payment on my wife's car this month. We've been getting calls and emails from the dealership telling us what a prefect time it would be to upgrade. One night the gummies kicked in and I decided to reply to the clearly automated and canned email. It was dripping with snark, along the lines of "I'll never buy a car because an email prompted me to". Got a call the next day from the dealership where they apologized... and then went right into a sales pitch.

A record share of Americans — more than 20% — agreed to pay more than $1,000 per month for a new car loan at the end of the year, according to car sales site Edmunds.

And how many households have 2 such payments?

I very much wish I could go car-free, but I have at least drastically reduced my vehicle usage over the past few years.

Everyone bragging now how old their car is like fuel efficiency and safety didn't improve at all in decades. You don't have to buy new car each year but there a benefits to driving something modern.

A lot of people have payments that high and beyond because they bought more car than they could afford, saw a newer shinier one later, and rolled their loan/trade forward into an even worse situation. The amount of people with negative equity in a fucking car genuinely shocks me.

People spending that much on a car have no one but themselves to blame. Even on a 36mo loan, you can get several perfectly nice models brand new for half that. Less if you're okay with a subcompact.